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Mt. Holz Science Fiction Society
Club Notice - 06/29/01 -- Vol. 19, No. 52
Chair/Librarian: Mark Leeper, 732-817-5619, mleeper@avaya.com
Factotum: Evelyn Leeper, 732-332-6218, eleeper@lucent.com
Distinguished Heinlein Apologist: Rob Mitchell, robmitchell@avaya.com
HO Chair Emeritus: John Jetzt, jetzt@avaya.com
HO Librarian Emeritus: Nick Sauer, njs@lucent.com
Back issues at http://www.geocities.com/evelynleeper
All material copyright by author unless otherwise noted.
The Science Fiction Association of Bergen County meets on the
second Saturday of every month in Upper Saddle River; call
201-447-3652 for details. The Denver Area Science Fiction
Association meets 7:30 PM on the third Saturday of every month at
Southwest State Bank, 1380 S. Federal Blvd.
===================================================================
1. I have entered people's email addresses into the egroups.com
mailing list for the MT VOID as we had them in our records. If you
want to change the address you get the MT VOID at, you can change
it by sending a message (any message) to "mtvoid-
unsubscribe@egroups.com" from your old address and "mtvoid-
subscribe@egroups.com" from your new one. If all else fails, you
can send email to me (evelyn.leeper@excite.com) with your old and
new addresses and I can change it. [-ecl]
===================================================================
2. Last week I committed myself to writing an account of semiotics.
(It is time you knew it. I have committed without having done my
homework so I am just assuming I can do this feat. If I hit it and
have no idea what it is about, I am in real trouble.)
Semiotics is the invention of Ferdinand de Saussure, a Swiss
linguistic theorist who lived from 1857 to 1913. His theories were
expounded in his lectures and edited AFTER HIS DEATH into text form
into the 1916 book, COURSE IN GENERAL LINGUISTICS. The book
studies how "signs" work.
Semiotics is a branch of "structuralism." Structuralism looks for
commonality in structures. For example there are many different
stories but each is claimed to be one of four basic stories:
romance, comedy, tragedy, or irony. (I am not sure I believe that
is true myself. I have a hard time classifying THE LORD OF THE
RINGS as one of these.) Elsewhere I have seen science fiction
broken into three categories: "what if," "if only," and "if this
goes on." Semiology is the study of commonality specifically among
signs.
A sign is anything that has meaning outside itself and is used to
communicate. A shrug of your shoulders, a slap in the face, a
picture of a rock slide on the road, and a billboard showing a
product are all signs. There are three kinds of sign: icons,
indexes, and symbols.
When you see two doorways near each other. One with a sign showing
a stick figure with a dress, the other showing a stick figure in
pants, we know what it means. These are icons and they look like
the people who should use those doors. (In fact, they look not so
much like the real object, but like an abstracted picture of the
people who should use each door.) An icon has a physical
resemblance to the object.
"Red sky at morning, sailors take warning; red sky at night,
sailor's delight." That's an old saying. The sailors are taking
something they see and associating it with a weather condition
coming. A rattling noise from a snake one associates with danger.
Associating two different things and using one to tell you of the
other is an "index." An index is a little more abstract than an
icon.
A symbol is more abstract still. A symbol is just an agreed upon
association. A Star of David is a symbol of Judaism. But that is
a symbol, pure and simple. The cross is an icon of a Roman
crucifixion cross (or a historically inaccurate visualization of
one--Romans, I believe, used a T-shape cross, which is much easier
to construct.). But that symbol has become associated with a
religion. Flowing water has become associated with the flow of
life, especially birth. Words are symbols that have become
associated with ideas.
Language has really two components. There is its grammar and
rules, which Saussure called "Langue." It is helpful in
understanding language, but is limited. The other component is
"Parole." That is the language as it is spoken. Langue is an
imperfect description of language you might hear. What you hear is
Parole, but without a knowledge of Lengue you cannot understand
Parole. Langue is a rough description of what one might expect to
find in Parole.
I am not sure that all this really adds up to much. It is a set up
observations whose veracity I doubt not so much as their
profundity. Perhaps all I can really do in so short an article is
to introduce the reader to a few of the ideas. So what is this all
leading up to? Saussure believes that all signs are arbitrary.
They are accepted only as a matter of convention. We accept that
"tree" refers to a type of plant, but not everybody has that
concept. An Inuit might not associate "tree" with anything. As
Shakespeare said, "a rose by any other name would smell as sweet."
If the convention is to call a horse a rose, that is what you call
a horse. Fine. I could have told you that. I think something my
father used to ask fits here. He would ask, "How many legs would a
horse have if you call his tail a leg?" Most people answer five.
The correct answer is four. A horse would have four legs no matter
what you called the tail. [-mrl]
===================================================================
3. HARRY POTTER AND THE GOBLET OF FIRE by J.K. Rowling (Copyright
2000, Scholastic Press, 734 pp., $25.95 Hardcover, ISBN 0-439-
13959-7) (a book review by Joe Karpierz):
HARRY POTTER AND THE GOBLET OF FIRE is the latest installment in
the wildly popular children's series of Harry Potter novels, and
the second of the four novels to be nominated for the Hugo Award.
As with last year's installment (HARRY POTTER AND THE PRISONER OF
AZKABAN), I don't think this novel deserves the nomination, but not
for the reason you might expect. Last year I had this inherent
bias that said that a children's novel, and for goodness sake, a
*fantasy* novel, shouldn't be nominated for a Hugo. But it was a
decent novel, and certainly a very good children's novel. In my
opinion, GOBLET is just plain old not a good enough novel to merit
the nomination.
Why? Well, the story is very uneven and unexciting, up until the
last couple of hundred pages or so, if that much. It's slow. And
it doesn't deliver on a very promising concept. Furthermore,
unlike PRISONER OF AZKABAN, this one actually sets up the next
novel in the sense that things have just blown wide open at the end
of it. And it's way too long at 734 pages.
It's Harry's fourth year at Hogwarts, and the year opens up with
the Quidditch World Cup. The whole leadin to the Cup, as well as
the Cup match itself, seems unrelated to the rest of the story.
However, and I'll give Rowling this, she does a marvelous job of
setting up what is to come in the opening chapters of the novel
which detail the events of the Cup and what happens immediately
following the match. Which is that the Dark Mark appears, the sign
of Voldemort, the big bad guy from previous novels. It's an
indication that Voldemort is returning. But let's leave that
behind for awhile.
The central storyline concerns the Triwizard tournament, an event
which hasn't been held for a very long time. It involves a
competition between wizards from different schools, with the winner
of the competition receiving a large monetary prize. To conduct
this tournament, which is supposed to bring the various schools of
wizardry closer together to work in cooperation with each other,
two other schools are involved, and the competition is being held
at Hogwarts. There are stories of legendary tasks (there are three
tasks to every Triwizard tournament) that were filled with danger.
Each school will have one representative, and no one under a
certain age would be eligible. This restriction leaves Harry
ineligible. But somehow, after the three names come out of the
Goblet, a fourth name comes out--Harry, of course.
The majority of the rest of the novel deals with the competition,
of course, and the surrounding mystery of just how Harry's name got
into the Goblet, since there were strong magicks put up to prevent
an underage contestant from putting their name in. And herein
begins with the list of disappointments. The three tasks, in and
of themselves, were not particularly dangerous at all. After the
buildup, the tasks were disappointing. There was also a weird
little side story with Hermione trying to fight for the rights of
house elves that never got finished.
Anyway, the story finally does pick up at the completion of the
third task. It is at this point that the pace picks up, the
tension increases, and it seems that Rowling truly engages the
reader. I certainly didn't know what was going to happen after
that. But it's also at that point that Goblet of Fire ceases to be
a children's novel, and, in my opinion, turns into an adult novel
in terms of some of the intensity and violence of the scenes.
And, do you remember that Quidditch World Cup way back at the
beginning of the review? Well, Rowling must also be given credit
for setting up most of what was to come in the first few chapters
of the novel. If you saw the clues, you could figure it out. It
was all there.
But truly, this book could have been better. It's great for the
kids, but not so great otherwise. [-jak]
Mark Leeper
HO 1K-644 732-817-5619
mleeper@avaya.com
A man gazing at the stars is proverbially at the mercy of the puddles in the road.
-- Alexander Smith